The 2024 Amos Vogel Lecture: Jia Zhangke

This event is $10 for FLC Members and $15 for General Public, and takes place Tuesday, October 8, 5:00pm at Walter Reade Theater. The lecture will be followed by a conversation between Jia and Walter Salles, director of NYFF62 Spotlight selection I’m Still Here and Jia Zhangke, a Guy From Fenyang (2014).

2021 marked the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. To celebrate this occasion and honor Vogel’s path-blazing legacy, NYFF inaugurated the Amos Vogel Lecture, to be delivered annually by an artist or thinker who embodies the subversive spirit of Vogel’s cinephilia and brings it into conversation with the present and future of cinema. 

For the fourth edition of the Amos Vogel Lecture, we are proud to welcome legendary auteur Jia Zhangke, whose latest feature, Caught by the Tides, screens in the NYFF62 Main Slate. In a career of nearly three decades, Jia has built a filmography that is relentlessly probing and experimental in form—spanning shorts, features, documentaries, realist fiction, and genre thrillers—while maintaining a consistent and humane focus on how people are swept up in the vicissitudes of China’s (and the world’s) history and politics. His latest combines footage shot by him over 23 years (including scenes and outtakes from past films) and distills his abiding interests in questions of modernity, urbanity, and change into a shimmering, elusive narrative centered on a woman played by Zhao Tao, Jia’s muse and partner. Caught by the Tides culminates an oeuvre that exemplifies Vogel’s curiosity, internationalism, and close attention to the intersections of people, cinema, and history. This lecture will be interpreted by Vincent Cheng. The Amos Vogel Lecture featuring Rolex Testimonee Jia Zhangke is presented in partnership with the watchmaking brand.

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